Police officers in riot gear outside Birmingham prison after a disturbance that took 12 hours to bring under control.
Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

It is no surprise that the prison authorities are closely monitoring every jail in England and Wales for signs of potential unrest after the riot at HMP Birmingham on Friday.

G4S-run Birmingham prison, formerly known as Winson Green, is not even among the worst jails in the country, where it is easier to get hold of illicit drugs than a bar of soap.

The independent monitoring board report that raised concerns in October about the “increasingly difficult behaviour of individual prisoners coupled with staffing shortages” and called for an urgent solution to the problem of dealing with the next “mamba attack” – relating to psychoactive highs – is in itself unexceptional.

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The overall judgment of the IMB was not that Birmingham was a failing prison, but that it continued to provide a safe environment for the majority of inmates and had made progress over the past year.

The chilling lesson of Friday’s riot is that if it can happen at HMP Birmingham, it can happen at any prison in England and Wales.

Birmingham was the fourth major disturbance in two months. The recent large-scale rampages at publicly run Lewes prison, Bedford jail and, on a smaller scale, HMP Moorland in South Yorkshire, show that there is a problem affecting publicly and privately run jails without distinction.

The difficulties of retaining low-paid staff at Birmingham are just as familiar to public sector prison managers. Justice ministers hope a new pay and retention package being voted on this week by unions will help resolve the issue at privately and publicly run prisons.

All the recent riots have involved a loss of capacity – two wings at Birmingham are out of action – that serves to increase the strain of managing the record 85,583 population in an overcrowded prison system. The fatal stabbing at Pentonville jail, followed by the first major prison escape for some time, have contributed to the sense of crisis, which is characterised by record numbers of assaults on staff and self-inflicted deaths that show no signs of abating.

The causes of the crisis were clearly set out in the Guardian last week by Phil Wheatley, the former head of the prison service in England and Wales. He firmly blamed the previous three Tory justice secretaries, Ken Clarke, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove, for a mixture of staffing cuts and wild swings in policy that have brought the custodial system to a “state of operational disaster”.

Wheatley rightly said it was to the credit of the justice secretary, Liz Truss, that she has been the first to secure £500m of extra Treasury money to reverse some of the staffing cuts by recruiting an extra 2,500 officers. But as the former prison service head pointed out, it is a crisis that will take years to put right.

Birmingham has been described as the worst prison disturbance since the Strangeways riots in 1990, when a wave of copycat protests spread through 30 jails in England and Wales.

As the Prison Governors Association has pointed out, it took 12 hours to retake command of Birmingham using specially trained Tornado riot teams from around the country, while it took three weeks to bring Strangeways under control.

A major new factor facing the prison authorities is social media, and the flow of videos and rumours coming from illicit mobile phones inside jails, with the capacity to shock the public and provoke copycat protests across the prisons estate.

The images of prisoners running wild, throwing tables, stealing computers and letting off fire extinguishers will strike political fear into the hearts of Theresa May’s closest Downing Street advisers if they are allowed to become a regular feature of nightly news bulletins.